The Business Benefits of a Hybrid Cloud Platform

Advances in platform technology are helping organizations make strides toward long-standing goals of agility, simplicity, and cost savings. The transformation of platforms from complex and expensive stacks of hardware into flexible computing resources represents a major step toward enabling business agility.

Given the ability to provision their own computing resources through self-service and storefront-like interfaces, business units will be less tempted to turn to shadow IT. The complexity and scope of the IT estate will be greatly reduced. And with consistent control and governance policies applied, the security of the overall system — not just the individual instance — will be improved.

The hybrid cloud platform can deliver value to the business by enabling digital transformation, giving it the best from the public cloud and on-premises infrastructure services, and transcending the corporate boundary.

• An agile compute infrastructure spanning private and public cloud allows the selection of the right location for workloads.

• Brokerage capabilities provide a relevant set of infrastructure and platform services under a hybrid cloud delivery model, eliminating the challenges of shadow IT.

• Unified and granular visibility into resource consumption show who, what, where, and for how long. This addresses governance, risk, and compliance, and leads to better workload analysis, placement, and – ultimately – cost optimization.

• Computing resources and platform capabilities can be obtained as a service, which means they can be scaled to fit business needs on demand.

• Harmonized service characteristics across public and private cloud infrastructures provide a consistent experience and deliver the benefits of a managed service with the level of control your business needs.

A critical component of the hybrid cloud platform is establishing an on-premises or private cloud to bridge the gap between traditional IT delivery and a public cloud, for workloads that can benefit from a cloud delivery model but need to remain on-premises. The private cloud ensures that the public cloud is exploited for appropriate workloads while maintaining traditional IT delivery for business-critical legacy applications, which can be optimized in place as needed. Rather than create a “competing” platform, the establishment of a private cloud creates a new center of gravity designed to naturally shift demand from existing infrastructure and shadow IT to a faster, less expensive, and more capable alternative.

Enabling business success

The evolution of the hybrid cloud platform represents good news for IT departments that have found themselves perpetually on their heels as they attempt to address an accelerating pace of change with a sprawling, complex, and aging IT estate.

The hybrid cloud platform represents a significant shift in infrastructure strategy — but it doesn’t have to disrupt current systems, which means this approach can be a positive initial step as part of a digital transformation or can be deployed as a solution to a discrete business requirement.

The hybrid cloud platform is freeing businesses from the constraints of proprietary stacks of hardware and software. It’s creating an environment where business users can get immediate access to the resources they need. It’s eliminating cost through automation. It’s enabling developers to embrace agile delivery. And it’s helping take the “shadow” out of shadow IT.

For more on enabling the enterprise through a hybrid cloud, download the full position paper from DXC Technology. Click HERE.